Have you ever been surprised by unexpected kindness? 

How do you stay open to the future without discounting what’s come before? 

Has gratitude ever helped you pivot your perception from a loss into a gain? 

In Morning Fuel, Becky Galli explores questions like these – one for each day of the year – along with musings, meditations, and advice for how we can meet life’s challenges with openness and grace. Indeed, Galli has faced many hardships: the death of her brother when he was seventeen, parenting two children with special needs, and coming to terms with her own paralysis. Despite these difficulties, Galli has thrived, finding optimism in her friends, family, and within herself.

A Baltimore resident since 1983, Galli began her writing career in 2000 with articles in The Baltimore Sun. She hasn’t stopped writing since. In addition to columns that ran in The North County News and The Towson Times, Galli published a memoir, Rethinking Possible, in 2017. She also shares columns and musings with subscribers in her “Thoughtful Thursdays” series. 

Galli took time to speak with The Fishbowl about the process of writing Morning Fuel and to share some advice about finding positive ways to engage with the world.

Baltimore Fishbowl: The book is structured according to a calendar year, with one entry for each day. Does this structure reflect the process you used to write it? 

Rebecca Faye Smith Galli: I’ve always been a fan of daily morning readings. They have helped me get through some tough times. After the publication of my memoir Rethinking Possible, I was often asked, “How do you do it? What helps you cope?” Morning Fuel is one answer as it offers quotes, mantras, and stories I’ve written or retold over the last 24 years that continue to strengthen and guide me. 

As I began gathering my favorite stories and collecting material for new ones, I found it helpful to consider the seasons since nature has a prominent role in most of my work. I first grouped entries and put in Word files labeled by month. Then I created one Word file to house all edited documents to give me quick access to the body of work if I needed to check for duplication of thoughts, phrases, or attribution.

After about 100 entries, Excel became my new best friend. I realized I needed help in tracking, so I created a spreadsheet that numbered each entry, its title, month, and word count. Later as I reviewed the entries from the reader’s perspective, I added columns to include quote attributions as well as friend and family names so I could sort and sequence those references in a thoughtful way.   

BFB: You include quotations and ideas from several philosophers and wellness experts throughout the book. What are books that you return to over and over? Which authors do you consistently recommend to others? 

RFSG: I love authors who offer thoughtful takes on life, who meet life head on and aren’t afraid of asking the hard questions or giving a vulnerable response. Some of my favorites include: Anne Lamott, Gretchen Rubin, Mark Nepo, Sarah Young, Richard Rohr, C.S. Lewis, Melanie Beattie, James Clear, Kelly Corrigan, Shane Parrish, John C. Maxwell. I read and reread their work, rotating periodically. 

BFB: Family is central to the book, and nearly every entry involves at least one of your family members. How did your living relatives feel about being featured? Was everyone on board? Did you allow them to provide feedback during your writing process?

RFSG: Fortunately—or unfortunately—my family is accustomed to being featured in my writing. After my paralysis, my marketing career pivoted to writing when in 2000, The Baltimore Sun published my first column about playing soccer with my son—from the wheelchair. The next published piece was about his first wrestling match and launched my From Where I Sit column where I regularly wrote about family life. My first book, Rethinking Possible: A Memoir of Resilience told the full story of my life and included theirs.

I never considered it unusual to include my family in my writing. As a PK (Preacher’s Kid), I grew up with my antics often becoming a sermon illustration. My goal, however, is to use my father’s approach and recount each one with accuracy, relevancy, and great heart. The last thing I would ever want to do would be to make a family member uncomfortable. 

BFB: One major theme in the book involves the importance of being able to change your perspective to deal with the challenges life throws at you. What have you found to be the most effective technique (or techniques) to facilitate a shift in perspective?

RFSG: Acceptance is the key to shifting perspective, in my experience. When a new challenge comes my way, I first decide what I need to accept, even if it’s, ‘I don’t know’ or “I need help.”  Then comes the tricky part—deciding what can be done this day about that issue. If possible, I act or make a plan. However, if there’s nothing more I can do, I place it gently on a shelf in my mind out of the center of my thinking so I’m not looking through it. I allow other parts of my life to come into focus, prompting a perspective shift. 

One of my favorite exercises that helps elevate my perspective is:

Even though________ (the unwanted circumstance) I can still________(name a present action or focus that’s available despite the circumstance)

If I’m still having trouble shifting my perspective, I try to find something to be grateful for—a magenta sunrise, progress on a lengthy project, or even remembering to break down the boxes for this week’s recycling.

BFB: So much of the book involves memories from your own childhood. What was it like uncovering those memories? Were there stories you had forgotten that re-emerged through the process of writing Morning Fuel? What was that experience like?

RFSG: It was an adventure, for sure! Many of the Morning Fuel readings are family classics: April 28: “No, I love you,” is a story my father told when I was seven and my sister Rachel was three. It was raining and Rachel had asked him with those mischievous eyes of hers if she could go outside to play. Dad looked outside and playfully answered, “Yes. Sure, honey.” Shocked, she asked again, and then again, but our father continued to give the same response. Finally, she said with a quiver in her voice, “Daddy, you don’t love me!” 

What a message that story has been to me through the years—parenting my four kids and now watching my kids parent their own– about the importance of setting boundaries and how those limits can show our love.

Writing about that scene brought it back to life –Rachel’s impish eyes, Dad’s playful smile, the huge hug they both shared after Dad told her that he was teasing and that of course she couldn’t go outside. It made me cherish my family home a little more and miss my father, now deceased, and my sister, now 800 miles away, even more.

BFB: Do you keep a daily journal? What role does writing play in your life when you are not actively working on a manuscript?

RFSG: I do keep a journal, but don’t hold myself to “daily.” After a bout of sepsis and a seventeen-day hospital stay in 2018, I grew impatient with my recovery progress. I had little energy and kept experiencing post-hospital complications. I felt like I was on a loop, never progressing forward, living the same day over and over. So, I got a beautiful spiral notebook and started journaling in seven areas: 

Body, Life, Mood, Goals, Accomplishments, Gratitude, Insights

With a journal, I could review the previous entries and track my progress. I had EVIDENCE of progress—I didn’t have to rely on my feelings (or memory!)  alone. Granted, sometimes my goals were small: Sleep seven hours. Drink eight glasses of water. Exercise ten minutes. But it gave me a wonderful feeling of success to check those boxes.

I usually journal after my morning readings. The process keeps my mind in gear, ready to capture insights or inspirations from my morning readings that later become fodder for Thoughtful Thursdays or other writing.

BFB: If you could share one piece of advice with your younger self, what would it be?

RFSG: Stay possibility-driven and hold plans lightly. Trust more in the process and worry less about the progress.         

Events for Morning Fuel

The Ivy Bookshop
October 26, 2024 10am-12pm, details here

Barnes & Noble Pikesville
November 2, 2024 2 PM to 6 PM

Baltimore County Public Library Cockeysville
Nov 7, 2024 6:30-7:30

In 2019, readers of this column met Judith Krummeck, who was just then publishing her hybrid biography/memoir, Old New Worlds, which entwined the story of her great-great-grandmother’s immigration from England to South Africa with her own, from Africa to here. Many probably felt like they already knew her, as she has been the voice of evening drive-time for Baltimore’s classical radio station, WBJC 91.5 FM, for over 20 years. An alum of the University of Baltimore MFA program, Krummeck had also drawn on her immigration experience for her thesis book, Beyond the Baobab.

Now Krummeck turns to fiction, following a path blazed by the trustiest of storytellers — William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is perhaps the most riffed-on writer in the English language, with retellings and spin-offs ranging from novels to teen rom-coms to musicals. Centuries after he originally penned his plays, Shakespeare’s portrayals of human nature still ring true. With Twelfth Night as its inspiration, The Deceived Ones tells a timely tale of Ukrainian refugees who find themselves in Baltimore. With themes relating to identity, belonging, creativity, and love, The Deceived Ones raises vital questions and engages the reader in a fast-paced and delightful narrative. It was a pleasure to chat with Krummeck about her debut novel.

Baltimore Fishbowl: What led you to write a novel? How was the process different from the composition of your previous two books?

Judith Krummeck: My transition from nonfiction to fiction came about by degrees. I was nervous about fiction (and, even more so, poetry!) but I took an inspiring elective with Professor Jane Delury during my MFA, and she helped me realize that it wasn’t as daunting to write fiction as I’d imagined. Because my concentration was creative nonfiction, which uses many of the tools of fiction like narrative arc, scene building, and dialog, the process of composition was not so very different.

In my biographical memoir, Old New Worlds, I had sparse factual information about my subject and needed to reimagine—to fictionalize—many aspects of her life based on my research. Having had a taste of it, I was keen to see if I could write a complete novel. 

BFB: The Deceived Ones includes many characters who are not originally from America, but who have found their way to Baltimore, and because you write the story from multiple points of view—including the perspective of a xenophobe—we see a range of experiences and attitudes about what it means to be a foreigner. What do you hope your readers will learn from the novel about the experience of immigrants and refugees?

JK: This is such a fraught subject. The gift of birthright is just that: a gift. In America it’s bestowed on people who, for the most part, have forebears who migrated here somewhere along the line. It’s as the former Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, once said, “Of course we couldn’t all come over on the Mayflower… But I got here as soon as I could…”

It’s disconcerting when new immigrants to the States are either lumped together in a dehumanizing mass or singled out as an anomaly. In writing about the diverse trajectories of each of my migrant characters, I wanted to humanize the experience. It’s both a struggle and a privilege for every immigrant who gets here. We want to make that count by giving our adopted country our best shot—as the construction workers on the Frances Scott Key Bridge were trying to do.

BFB: Music is a vital part of the story, and the viol de gamba is a key element in the plot. Do you have a musical background? Why did you choose to have Vira play a historical instrument? Does the idea of music and the power of creating music as a group have metaphorical meaning here?

JK: I have somewhat of a musical background. I studied music history and I was a singer back in the day. Nowadays, being a classical music DJ helps me to feel steeped in it. Having Vira play viola da gamba was a nod to Shakespeare’s Elizabethan era. I wanted to thread elements through the book that would link us to that time, even though the setting is contemporary. I needed to have a way for Vira and Orson’s paths to cross, and her playing a rarified instrument seemed to present interesting possibilities.

Your question about metaphorical meaning is so interesting! You mentioned earlier that I’ve written the novel from multiple points of view. My reason for doing so was again a nod to Shakespeare in that, when we go to hear a play, we experience the whole through the performance of each individual actor. Similarly, making music together as a group relies on each musician to create the performance of a piece. If there’s a metaphorical idea here, perhaps it relates back to your question about the experience of migrants. It’s about the power of music to pick up where words end, and the idea that, rather than being “us and them,” we are all contributing to this melting pot of a country. 

BFB: The plot is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a work that is also the subject of the opera the character Orson is writing. Could you talk a bit about why this play interests you and why it works so well (and I think it does!) for a modern story?

JK: Again, it goes back to immigration for me. Yes, Twelfth Night is a play about mistaken identity and unrequited love, but I’m also keenly aware that Viola and Sebastian arrive in the strange country of Illyria and must try to find their way as outsiders. This displacement that migrants feel, something I’ve experienced in my own life, is still very real today. Also, the cross-dressing, or what we might think of now as androgynous or nonbinary, is fundamental to the plotline. It’s thought-provoking to consider this in terms of sexual and gender orientation issues which, like immigration, are often contentious today. Then, the Malvolio character in my book is not only annoyingly fastidious but also, as you pointed out, xenophobic as well as racist. This sets up a conflict in his infatuation with the Olivia character, whom I’ve written as bi-racial. It gave me an opportunity to reflect on that aspect of “them and us,” which is unfortunately still rife in contemporary society.

BFB: In your acknowledgements, you note that Baltimore provided the right backdrop for the novel because it reflects “both light and shade.” Could you say more about why Baltimore is the ideal setting for this story? 

JK: Last year, it was cause for celebration when the Baltimore homicide rate was “only” 262. What’s wrong with this picture? The city is linked to grim and gritty aspects of The Wire, and that finds its way into my novel. Yet, we also have world class art institutions, a renowned music conservatoire, a major U.S. symphony orchestra, a hospital so prestigious that that one need only say Johns Hopkins for it to be internationally understood, and the same is true for the university of that name.

Baltimore is famously full of quirky individuals like the characters who people my book, it has a vibrant and supportive writing community, and it’s culturally and ethnically diverse. This last was especially apposite in terms of the Ukrainian community in southeast Baltimore, given that my twins are refugees from Ukraine. I’d actually started out writing about an unnamed East Coast city. But Baltimore has grown on me, and I’ve now lived here longer than I’ve lived anywhere. I wanted to honor that in some way and write about a place that I know intimately. The more I did so, the more it seemed to make sense for this story.

Events
Midday with Tom Hall, WYPR 88.1 FM Baltimore
• Tuesday, May 7, 2024, 12:00 PM

Ivy Bookshop launch
• Tuesday, May 7, 2024, 6:00 PM

Reading and conversation at the Pratt Central Library
• Saturday, May 25, 2024, 2:00 PM
• With Lesley Malin of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company.

Reading at Manor Mill, Monkton, MD
• Saturday, June 15, 2024, 5:00 PM
• With music from cellist Molly Aronson.

Reading and music at Evergreen Museum & Library
• Saturday, September 14, 2024, 12:00 PM  

Danielle Ariano’s debut memoir, The Requirement of Grief, is powerful not just because of the wrenching account of losing her her sister to suicide, but also because of the honest depiction of the years of tumult leading up to Alexis’s death. Ariano captures the cycle of hope and disappointment, forgiveness and anger, healing and self-destruction that will be familiar to those who have cared for someone who suffers from mental illness or addiction. Candid in her descriptions of her difficult relationship with her sister, Ariano reveals a frustration that can only be born of love, allowing readers into her process of grieving this terrible loss.

Near the end of the book, Ariano muses, “As time passes, I learn that grief’s only requirement is that it must be carried.” Indeed, Ariano carries her grief with grace, allowing us to see both her pain and her resilience, acknowledging that grief may someday exist beside “the throes of the deepest joy.”

We were fortunate to talk with her about the process of writing this book.

Baltimore Fishbowl: Could you start by sharing how this book came to be? You mention the early stages of writing about your sister’s death while at Soaring Gardens, a writer’s retreat center in Pennsylvania. At what point did you know you were writing a book? Could you talk a bit about what your process was like?

Danielle Ariano: It was at Soaring Gardens in 2016, shortly after my sister died, that I first I allowed myself to believe I was writing a book. While I was there, I started revising the pieces I’d written over the years and I also wrote down all the details about the events surrounding Alexis’ death – things I knew I would forget later, like the trip to the undertakers and the meeting with the salesman who sold us the plot in the cemetery. I also started trying to figure out a structure for the book, but that was completely premature because so many of the of the more reflective chapters of the book hadn’t even been written at that point, and I was so fresh in my grief. 

Whenever I do anything creative—cook, make cabinets, or write—it’s a messy process. I have to let myself dive into the unknown with some element of trust that something worthwhile will come out of it. Creating anything is an act of faith, and you have to have an ability to withstand uncertainty, but I’ll be honest, this book tested me. I had to live in the mess for much longer than I was comfortable with. My writing partner, Judith Krummeck, helped me immensely in this regard because she believed that this story absolutely needed to be told. When I had my doubts, her belief buoyed me. 

BFB: Writing the book is one thing, but publishing it is a whole other animal. What was the publication process like? How do you feel knowing your story and your sister’s story will be out in the world? 

DA: It’s a weird process to write a book, especially a memoir. For me, I have to block out everything in the beginning. I can’t think about the people who might read it, I just need to get it all on the page. Then, at a certain point there is an absolute shift and the people who I hope will read the book become the focus and I start balancing the art of writing with what an audience will want and need from a book. 

Initially, for example, I did not write a suicide scene, but Marion Winik, my professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore, pointed out that my audience would need some explanation of how my sister died. Ultimately, the scene was something I wrote after considering the reader and I’m glad to have written it because it expanded both me and the book.  

As far as how I’m feeling…having this book out in the world feels like I’m wearing my insides on the outside. 

BFB:  Many of the chapters are quite short, all of them titled, and at times I felt almost like I was reading prose poems. (In the most wonderful way!) Why did you choose to name each chapter? Did you intentionally keep many of the chapters brief?

DA: I never considered not naming the chapters. It was sort of an unconscious decision. As far as the chapter length, I wrote what I felt needed to be written and sometimes that was long, sometimes short, so I wound up with a lot of shorties, which kind of worked out because the subject matter is very heavy, and I find that short chapters can be a relief, a chance for the reader to exhale and reset a bit. When it came time to arrange the book, I found myself thinking about chapter length as well as narrative continuity.

BFB: What do you hope readers will learn from reading your story? Is there anything related to mental health you wish more people understood?

DA: I think this book shows the ripple effects that one family member’s illness can have on all the other people in the family, as well as the difficulties that the person with the illness experiences. I hope that it’s not an either/or perspective, but a both/and.

For me, the feelings of anger and frustration that I carried toward Alexis brought me so much pain and shame. I felt like I should’ve been a better person, more compassionate, more loving, more understanding, but at the same time, I saw and felt the repercussions that Alexis’ actions sometimes had. The emotions around loving someone through their illness are very complicated. Sometimes, I couldn’t stand my sister. Sometimes I wanted to rush in and fix everything. Sometimes I retreated into my anger. 

I guess I hope that anyone who relates to this complex tangle of emotion will feel seen as they read, and they perhaps will be able to forgive themselves more easily when they run up against some of the uglier emotions.  

BFB:  Did writing this help give you any clarity about your relationship with Alexis? Or if not clarity, do you feel more at peace with it?

DA: More at peace is a good way to phrase it. When Alexis died, we were mostly estranged. I think that if you had asked her in the weeks before she died, whether she thought I loved her, her answer would have been no. Her death suspended our relationship there. There will never be another chance to heal us, but through the process of writing, especially the chapters that I wrote from my sister’s imagined point of view, I allowed myself to see the world through her eyes in a way that I think I was too afraid to do when she was alive, and this has brought me better understanding and I feel more at peace with everything. 

BFB: What are you working on these days? How has parenting changed your writing life? 

DA: Parenting has placed a time constraint on my writing life in a pretty major way. The only way that I’ve found to write is in stolen time and that stolen time always comes with a tablespoon of guilt. If I want to write, it typically means I sleep less/I write in shorter spans. I might get 30 minutes and I have to take what I can get. On the plus side, being a mom has given me so much material to write about because in considering how I want to raise a child, I have to also reflect on how I was raised. Do I want to teach lessons the way my parents taught me? What will I do differently and why? Even seemingly minor things like how much autonomy Lindsay and I give to Cooper over what he wears, is a rich topic that could easily comprise an entire essay/chapter. 

All this to say, I’m working on my next book which will be centered around motherhood in a same-sex relationship, which I imagine is both different and the same from motherhood in a heterosexual relationship. There will definitely be an essay about why my parents wouldn’t let me wear my Dan Marino jersey every day and why they forced me to wear pink. 

Events

April 21: Launch, in conversation with Judith Krummeck; Ivy Bookshop, 5928 Falls Rd., 4 pm

May 3: Reading and Discussion, Writing About Mental Illness, with Jeannie Vanasco and Ashley Elizabeth, moderated by Marion Winik; Red Emma’s, 3128 Greenmount Ave., 7 pm

May 15: Panel, “Knowing When The Writing is Done;” Kramer’s Books, 1517 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC, 7 pm

June 17: Reading, Manor Mill, 2029 Monkton Rd., Monkton, MD, 7 pm

It is a tragic and seemingly inevitable truth that war is a part of human existence. It is also apparent, as the daily news reminds us with far too great a frequency, that war does not make exceptions for innocent civilians. In particular, children are the unwitting victims of war, and what they experience shapes who they are and how they interact with the world. Pantea Amin Tofangchi’s debut poetry collection, Glazed with War, recounts her own experience growing up in Iran during the war with Iraq. 

Each poem in the collection comes from the perspective of her young self as she moves through her daily routine of school and life with her parents and siblings against the backdrop of destruction. The bombs that explode nearby, the tragedies that accumulate among her classmates, the trauma she internalizes living in constant fear for the violence that could befall her – these are all elements Tofangchi captures in the simple, innocent voice of a child.  

Read on to learn more about Pantea’s process and inspiration for this fine collection. 

Baltimore Fishbowl: This collection is written from your perspective as a child. What led you to the decision to write from this point of view? What does this voice allow you to communicate?

Pantea Amin Tofangchi: Years before I started this manuscript, as an assignment for a poetry class I had to write a poem about a memory from my childhood. I remember when I was reviewing this specific memory in my head, I could easily picture it, I could see it like a movie. When I started writing my first draft of that poem, I liked how first-person voice got rid of a lot of unnecessary extra explanation that I wanted to show in my poem. But more importantly, it allowed me to relive those emotions again. Later when the idea of writing a lot of those memories was shaping, I decided to keep the child’s POV because first it stopped me from forcing my grown-up language, belief and emotion and perhaps even censoring myself, but it also let me keep the language very simple yet real. 

BFB: Have you written other poems about the war from an adult’s point of view? If so, how are these poems different? 

PAT: I have written a few poems specifically about war as an adult. I do believe the voice of the child was better received by the audience. But I do know being a war-child is part of who I am, and it comes out even when I am writing about another subject. I do notice that being an immigrant has the same effect on me and my writing.

BFB: Did the process of writing these poems help you understand your experience in new ways? If so, could you talk a bit about how? Are there things you know now that you wish you could tell your child self?

PAT: Such a great question. I do believe writing this collection changed my way of thinking quite a bit. I wrote this collection with a very restrictive ritual, I am actually very impressed that I was able to stick to the rules I put for myself. The day I decided to write this manuscript, I promised myself that every morning I will read William Stafford for one hour and then I will write for one hour. And I did that for two months without missing a day. By the end of two months, I had a little over 60 poems. What was fascinating to me was that memories started to come to the surface, memories that I consciously and subconsciously had buried, to the point I didn’t think I had those memories. It took me about a week of reading different poems from different poets that I decided I should read William Stafford. 

To answer the last part of your question, sigh, things I know now are much too dark. Back then I only knew of one war. I still believed in good guys and bad guys and that the good guys will win! I did not know that wars are the way of making money for some countries. Perhaps I would tell my child-self not to grow up!

BFB: Why William Stafford?

PAT: I would say mainly him being an active pacifist has always affected me. But I collected a few books during the week I was deciding who I want to read: William Stafford, Robert Bly, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Cummings and I think a few others. I collected the books and sat down and read a few random poems from each for several days, and William Stafford spoke to me more than the others, especially in terms of the subject I was about to write. Especially the poem “History Display.” The idea of escaping history haunted me! Reading and rereading  . . .  it was just the right voice I needed in my head every morning! 

BFB: Could you talk about the title? What does it mean to you?

PAT: That was literally a hands-on experience! I used to take pottery class; I was glazing one of my pieces. I was looking at my imperfect bowl that I was very proud of, dipping it in a barrel of teal glaze, I thought to myself I wish I could glaze me! I would have come out heat-proof, dishwasher, and microwave safe, all shiny and teal! The metaphor lingered in my mind. A few days later, as I was driving to my pottery class, it was very clear that in fact I have been glazed with war. I am tough; I went through a lot in my life aside from war, and I went through everything strong, dishwasher safe. Glazed with war.

BFB: According to your bio, you write poetry in English, but prose and plays primarily in Persian. Why does English seem like the right language for your poems?

PAT: Poetry has always been part of my life, or I should say the lives of Iranians in general. I never thought of writing a poem, though, until I took a poetry class. And I immediately felt the connection, especially writing in English. I had to say quite a lot with so few words, a lot of pauses and all my emotions. I came to realize that language is just a tool and I loved how my love for literature in general overpowered my imperfections in writing in English! 

BFB: The collection includes drawings throughout. Did you always intend to include art with the poems? What led you to do this? Do the poems come first and then the drawings?

PAT: Not at all. I didn’t. I am a graphic designer by profession, which is just like poetry, where you have to say a lot in such a limited space with so few words and lots of white space. I knew I wanted to have pauses in my book. I wanted for the reader to pause and take moment to see a child in the most vulnerable situation. When my husband read the manuscript for the first time, I remember asking him if he could do drawings for them. I loved how he drew and saw the “child”: her frustrations, her fragility and her innocence and how those simple drawings created that pause.  

Launch Event
in conversation with Judith Krummeck
Saturday November 11, 7 pm at Red Emmas
more info and RSVP here

For those of us who were old enough to follow the news in 2001, the events of September 11 are a dark milestone. As with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. or the explosion of the Challenger, the 9/11 attacks are terrible collective markers in time; we remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. We cannot forget the terrible footage we watched of planes exploding into the towers and victims leaping from fiery windows. Few can fathom why anyone would commit such a crime.

In her new novel, “When We Were Twins,” Danuta Hinc explores this very question: what drives a person to commit an atrocious act of violence against innocent people?

The story tells of a young Egyptian boy, Taher, and his twin sister, Aisha. Through vivid scenes of Taher’s childhood and adolescence, we begin to understand the ways in which his love and loyalty were corrupted by war and radicalized into weapons. 

Hinc, born in Poland under the communist regime, originally used this material in a novel called “To Kill the Other.” As she told the Baltimore Sun at the time of its publication in 2011, “I realized that I needed to know what leads people to make such extreme choices,” says Hinc, who teaches literature and writing classes at the University of Maryland College Park. “And the next question I asked was: Am I capable of killing someone?”

In an unexpected plot twist, Tate Publishing closed its doors shortly after the book was released and it quickly went out of print. Frustrated, Hinc eventually decided to re-imagine the storyline and seek another publisher. “Unfortunately,” she told the Fishbowl, “the subject of radicalization and terrorism, including domestic terrorism, is more relevant today than when I did my research for the original book.”

She elaborated further on the ideas behind this troubling novel in an email interview.

Baltimore Fishbowl: “When We Were Twins” explores the motivations behind someone who is involved in an appalling act of violence against innocent people. Why was it important to you to show the events from the point of view of one of the perpetrators? 

Danuta Hinc: I wanted to explore the question of humanity. What does it really mean? How far can we go? What is empathy, really? Is it possible to see humanity in a person who commits an unspeakable act of terror? It was difficult for me to say yes, and that was my challenge, to construct a character that makes us see his humanity despite his actions. I was hoping that by doing this I would be able to discover the missing link, the moment in life that turns someone into an extremist, a radicalized person, who stops seeing others as fellow humans and starts seeing them as someone who needs to be judged and further, as someone who needs to be punished, and even killed. The romantic in me is hoping to change the world. The realist in me wants to understand the process of radicalization. 

I am hoping that “When We Were Twins” inspires readers to learn about the world, to be curious. I am hoping that they would feel compelled to learn about other cultures, other customs, other religions, other countries, and people who are different from themselves. One of my literary idols, Toni Morrison, said this: “When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, ‘Don’t pay any attention to that.’ First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Imagine it, create it.” 

Writing from the point of view of one of the perpetrators was the best way to see the inner workings of someone who undergoes the slow and gradual change from a studious, kind, and carrying boy to someone who commits acts of violence. I wanted my readers to be in his head, and say, “I hate what he did, of course I do, but I understand why he did it.” I wanted to present a character who shows that radicalization is possible even for someone who was the perfect child, the perfect friend, the perfect son, the perfect grandson, and most importantly, the perfect twin brother. I believe that this is an extreme kind of empathy. 

BFB: As a white woman, you have taken a risk by exploring the point of view of a character who is not only male, but also from a background that seems very different from your own. Why did you feel it was important to proceed with it, even in a climate that is quick to criticize authors for appropriation?  

DH: The question of appropriation is one of the most important and urgent questions of our time and needs to be explored and discussed until the need for it disappears. 

But this concern goes too far when critics demand from novelist to write “what they know,” limiting fiction to autobiographical exercise. What would happen to readers of “Harry Potter,” “The Handmaid’s Tales,” “The Shining,” or “Blindness” to name just a few? 

BFB: The novel takes place in several locations quite far from Maryland. The central characters are born in Turkey, and later Taher moves to Afghanistan. Could you describe the research you did to write this novel?

DH: I visited Istanbul for the first time in June this year, and it was an exceptional experience. I felt like I was visiting an old dear friend. All the places I researched – the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia Mosque, the Grand Bazaar, the Istanbul Cistern – turned out to be even more magical than what I imagined while researching the city for the novel. 

While working on the novel, I relied on research and interviews. I learned about the Middle East from books. I studied the Torah and the Quran. I read online magazines and newspapers from the Middle East. But most importantly, I interviewed people from Egypt, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, Pakistan and Iran, and this novel would have been impossible without their help. They opened their homes to me and invited me to sit at their tables. They shared their experiences and taught me about their cultures, customs, and religions. This was the best part of my research, and I am lucky to still count them among my friends today.  

BFB: Twins and the motif of duality appear throughout the novel. Could you talk a bit about the idea of twins and how this symbol informs the themes of the novel? 

DH: In exploring the theme of duality, I constructed a world in which everyone is connected to everyone on a deep spiritual, even mystical level, like twins in a womb, but only some (especially women, unearthly creatures of flesh and soul) can see the connection. Women, the one giving life in the novel, are entangled in the world of men at war, trying to save—throughout history—anything they can. 

Launch at Bethesda Writers Center
Saturday, September 23, 6:30-8:30
registration required
more information here

When the 2015 Baltimore uprising took place, I was teaching English at an affluent private middle school in the city. We had been studying To Kill a Mockingbird and had just finished the chapter in which we discover that Tom tried to escape from prison – earning himself seventeen bullets in the back. The film version softens the blow by making it a single shot, but the end result for Tom is the same, just as it has been for far too many Black men in the years since Harper Lee wrote the novel. We didn’t really talk about Freddie Gray in the classroom; such charged topics were taboo at school, but how little seemed to have changed in attitude and practice since the 1960s was not lost on me. As I watched my city burn, I had no idea that much of the information I was learning about what happened to Freddie Gray was as manufactured as the story the prison warden tells Atticus Finch about Tom. 

In her new book, They Killed Freddie Gray, Justine Barron untangles the mess of fact and false information that circulated about the Gray case, helping to paint the most accurate picture we have of what happened that day in April 2015. We are grateful that she shared some of her key findings with us.

Baltimore Fishbowl: Your examination of Freddie Gray’s death began as a podcast in 2017. Could you talk about why you decided to expand your research into a book? Why did you feel it was important to continue pursuing answers in this particular case? 

Justine Barron: My book is based on mounds of new evidence that my investigative partner, Amelia McDonell-Parry, and I didn’t have during the recording of the “Undisclosed” podcast series. 

The book answers a lot of questions raised by the podcast. Our podcast did a great job at deconstructing the details of the police’s narrative—the chase, knife arrest, six-stop van ride, the theory that Gray was killed from being thrown forward while the van was in motion. We had a theory of deadly police force at the van’s second stop based on a compelling eyewitness and a couple of witnesses backing her up, and this theory aligned with the medical evidence. 

Then, near the beginning of 2020, a source delivered me a goldmine of unreleased evidence that was never supposed to be public, and that’s when I knew I had a book to write. It exposed a cover-up that was far more extensive than we had realized. 

I obtained discovery evidence that State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s office had turned over to the defense attorneys representing the officers, but her team didn’t use in court. Most notably, there were many statements by eyewitnesses which were remarkably consistent about force at the first two stops, with details corroborated by other evidence. Mosby’s office did not consider these witness statements important, as prosecutors denied that the officers used force during the first two stops at Gilmor Homes. 

BFB: How did the very deep and detailed research you did for the book change your understanding of the case? 

JB: Working on this book gave me the chance to put all of the puzzle pieces of Gray’s arrest together in intricate, interconnected detail. And I was able to identify where certain decisions by investigators and officials fell on the spectrum from incompetence to corruption. Writing the book also allowed me to tie this case to the broader story of Baltimore and U.S. criminal justice. 

One big take-away is that there isn’t just a thin blue line but a very thick one. The book reveals all of the institutions that protect officers from accountability. This included Mosby’s office, which might sound strange considering that she charged six officers. That part of the story is the most layered. 

Another big takeaway is the power of a police lie. Once police state something or write it down, it has enormous power to influence investigators, prosecutors, judges, the medical examiner, the media, and so on. Forget contradictory or missing evidence! Forget a dozen corroborating witnesses! What matters is what “police say.” A police lie has even more power than photographic evidence of force on Gray’s body. 

BFB: In the book you discuss and debunk a number of falsehoods that circulated about the case. What were some of the most egregious stories about Freddie Gray’s case, and why are rumors such as these so harmful?

JB: The big defining lie was introduced by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on the day after Gray’s death. His fatal injury “happened in the van,” she said, meaning behind closed doors, without cameras or people watching, so it was a mystery. There was no proof of this claim. Police had barely investigated the case at that point. There was more evidence of excessive force. Rawlings-Blake wasn’t alone in pushing that agenda after Gray’s death.

There were also a ridiculous number of false leaks to the media about how Gray was killed —banging his head, a bolt in the van, and so on—six in one week! Most were reported seriously by major news outlets based on “sources.” BPD used these stories to successfully distract the media and public.

Behind the scenes, the most influential lie in the case was that Gray caused the van to shake at Stop 2. This small detail becomes a true-crime linchpin in the narrative and unfolds in fascinating ways.

BFB: In the introduction, you note that your original podcast led to a cease-and-desist letter from the Fraternal Order of Police. Has the publication of this book created any similar reactions? Has there been renewed media interest in the case since your findings?

JB: One of the lead prosecutors sent me a threatening legal letter recently. The publisher and I brought in lawyers to make sure that I was not defaming anyone, just revealing facts. The letter actually ended up as evidence in the book, because it made a claim about the witnesses. I’ll take whatever evidence I can find! 

Amelia and I have struggled for years to get local reporters to care about new evidence. We offered to share the files themselves. We were ignored or even told our evidence couldn’t be trusted. I had videos! I’ve been dealing with these issues for years in Baltimore, not just on this story. 

I’m not sure if my book will renew interest in this case, but I hope so. It’s an uphill battle to radically correct the record on a famous story. Most people believe Gray was killed from a rough ride or during his initial arrest. He did seem to be in physical distress in the viral video of his arrest, and there’s evidence to support he was injured, if not fatally, at that point. But my book offers substantial evidence of a different cause of death, which happened around the corner from his arrest. 

BFB: Your research reveals that multiple institutions including the police, the Baltimore City government, and somewhat surprisingly even the media were all involved in essentially covering up the truth of what happened to Freddie Gray. How much of this do you think was an orchestrated effort? Do you have new insights as to why the media would have settled for less than the truth?

JB: In terms of key parties—BPD, the State’s Attorney’s Office, Fraternal Order of Police, City Hall, the Medical Examiner’s office, others—I offer strong evidence of coordination around certain parts of the narrative, particularly that it “happened in the van.” All of this started in the days just after Gray died. I have notes from meetings, officials whispering on a hot mic, and more. The parties involved didn’t all have the same agendas or levels of awareness. Cover ups at this level take both willing and naive participants. 

The media is a different story. Each outlet is different in terms of why and how it ended up reinforcing police untruths. I have a chapter on the media. I couldn’t avoid asking: how did mainstream media cover this case obsessively for two years and miss what really happened?

They got caught up in the mystery, spectacle, and racial tension—Black against Blue Lives, Mosby against BPD. Police benefit when cases become polarized and politicized. It takes the heat off of the facts.

BFB: Obviously we can’t do anything now to help Freddie Gray, but what do you hope readers of your book will take away from the new insights into the case? How do you hope this investigation might change things in the future?

Without being didactic, I really did want this book to offer an inside-policing kind of blueprint for how to hold police accountable in similar cases, down to scrutinizing body cam footage. 

But mostly, I just wanted to correct the historical record. Maybe, after reading this book, people will have some insight into how much of what we think happened in history was actually propaganda and cover up. 

Upcoming Events for They Killed Freddie Gray

August 10 at 7pm: Book Launch at Red Emma’s bookstore. Guests will include witnesses to what happened to Freddie, who didn’t get to testify in court, and people who were on the ground during the Baltimore Uprising.  

August 11 at 6pm: Event/discussion with Bards Alley in Vienna, VA, with Wesley Lowery (“They Can’t Kill Us All”)

August 22 at 3pm (6pm PST): Virtual event with City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, including Rabia Chaudry and Alex Vitale (“The End of Policing”). 

One of my bookmarks is printed with the quotation: “We lose ourselves in books. We find ourselves there, too.” Part of me is tempted to roll my eyes at this quaint proclamation, but mostly I have to admit that this contradictory experience is precisely what I seek when I read fiction – an escape from reality that will return me to my own life with a deeper understanding of myself and my world. 

Jane Delury’s Hedge delivers exactly this. With writing so vivid and lush that you find yourself standing in a garden bed, smelling the metallic earth, scraping the silty loam from under your fingernails, you can easily lose yourself in the world of Hedge. The story is engaging, the outcome unexpected, and the protagonist, Maud, so deftly drawn, she could be your own sister or mother or best friend. As Maud navigates complicated questions related to desire, motherhood, and the ever-elusive balance that so many of us seek, you may, as I did, find something of yourself in the pages. 

A native Californian who has lived in Baltimore since grad school at Hopkins, Jane comes to her second book on a wave of impressive acclaim. She was named the winner of the prestigious 2019 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction for her 2018 debut novel-in-stories, The Balcony, and she’s also received a PEN/O. Henry Prize, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Story Award, a VCCA fellowship, and grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. A professor at the University of Baltimore, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts and directs the BA in English. 

To read more about the plot of Hedge, check out early reviews at Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal. Launching next week, it has already has been selected as a top summer pick by both Oprah Daily and People magazine. Below, Jane offers Baltimore Fishbowl readers some insight into how the novel came to be.

Baltimore Fishbowl: Your protagonist, Maud, works as a landscape historian. I suspect I am not alone in having been totally ignorant of this career option until reading Hedge. What led you to this idea? Is there symbolism at play?

Jane Delury: Being a landscape historian is definitely a niche career, although it’s more common in England, where Maud trains. Like many writers, I think I give my characters professions that I find intriguing, perhaps ones I might have pursued in a different life. I’m interested in history and archeology, but I don’t think I have the patience for deep-bottomed scholarship or the exacting work of archeology, where you might dig test pits for months before finding a single nail. 

Restoring a garden requires skills from both of those areas, but, well, you get to see plants growing pretty quickly! And I do love the metaphor of bringing a long dead garden back to life, so you’re right about symbolism. At the start of the novel, Maud is trying to bring herself back to life by separating from her husband and taking on an exciting project in the Hudson Valley. She gardens herself to personal freedom throughout the book from the Hudson Valley, to the Presidio in San Francisco, and finally on Alcatraz.

BFB: Could you talk about the research you did for all of the gardening and landscaping that occurs in the novel? 

JD: I read a ridiculous amount of material about gardening and gardening history, about the history of the Hudson Valley and San Francisco. But to understand Maud, I needed to understand her world and her work. I spent a good amount of time early on learning about the vegetable garden at Monticello, where I had originally set part of the book, as well as the archeological digs investigating the homes and gardens of the enslaved gardeners on the mountain. 

When I moved the location of the opening section to the Hudson Valley, I found another great team of people at Montgomery Place. I had a draft of the novel by then, and the director of horticulture, Amy Parella, literally walked the grounds with me, helping me set different scenes in appropriate locations. For instance, there was no hedge at Montgomery Place, so we found a reasonable spot to place one. 

I did similar work for the garden Maud restores at the Presidio in San Francisco. That garden does not actually exist, but I worked with Kari Jones, an archeologist at the Presidio, to make my fiction credible. The novel is an amalgam of “real” history and these fictionalized approximations.  

BFB: At first, it seems like this will be a novel about a woman finding new love after the disintegration of her marriage, but the plot leads readers in unexpected directions. Could you talk a bit (without spoilers!) about how the plot evolved? 

JD: I knew early on that there would be a major shift in the middle of the novel, a surprise for Maud and for the reader—and since only trouble is interesting in fiction, not a good surprise! I was interested in the way we can see things one way as we experience them and then see them in a completely different light later. Maud thinks things are one way at Montgomery Place and finds, traumatically, that they are another. The second part of the book, on one level, is about her learning to trust her impulses and impressions again.

BFB: In many ways the emotional center of this book is the mother-daughter relationship. How did your own experiences as a mother of two daughters inform the writing of this novel?

JD: When I started to write Hedge, I was recently divorced and raising my two girls on my own, though with an excellent coparent. I worried about how my life choices would affect my children, so in Hedge, I was writing into my greatest fears. At the same time, I understood Maud’s desire for a different life and the belief that she could only be a good mother if she pursued it. I think this is a conundrum many people face, especially women.

BFB: Maud develops an intense friendship – what she even characterizes as an emotional affair – with an eccentric woman named Alice. Why did you include that relationship in the novel instead of having Maud involved in a romantic entanglement? 

JD: From the start of Hedge, Maud is emotionally alienated in her marriage. At Montgomery Place, she finds a connection with Gabriel, the resident archeologist. When she’s back in the Bay Area, despite everything that has happened in the preceding two years (no spoilers!), she’s still on her own emotionally. Enter Alice. Alice is very different from Maud, but they share a love of landscape and nature and they start to hike together. I know many women who are more or less content in their partnerships but find their real sustenance in friendships with other women. I wanted to explore that phenomenon in the book. And I love Alice. I wish I had her as a friend myself.

BFB: You are married to the fiction writer, Don Lee. Did he have a role in your writing process? If so, what was that like? 

JD: Don reads every word I write, and he read this manuscript more times than I want to count. (I read his drafts too so it’s fair, I say!) His notes had a huge influence on the book. He understood what I was trying to do from the first draft, and he’s an excellent editor. I’m lucky to have him one room over from me as I work, although I try to leave him alone on Sundays. 

BFB: Hedge is published by a new imprint, Zibby Books. What has the process of working with a new press been like?

JD: Being with Zibby Books has been a wonderful adventure. The press is unique in the way it supports its authors and their books. Every step of the process with Hedge has involved so much care and attention, from the editing to the planning of my book tour. Zibby Books is more than a press, actually, it’s a community. The authors sustain each other and the team (they are truly a team) nurtures those connections. When Leigh Newman first acquired the manuscript, I had no idea that I would end up with so many new and talented friends. It’s been a beautiful thing.

Upcoming Baltimore Events for Hedge

Tuesday, June 6

6pm at The Ivy Bookshop

Tuesday, July 11

7pm at Greedy Reads

Adult life is hard, and I have yet to meet anyone who actually feels like a grown-up. Most of us are making it up as we go along, trying our best to be decent humans, doing as little damage as we can. The political state of our country hasn’t helped matters, and making sense of all the anger buzzing around us is an exercise in frustration at best, despair at worst. Add to this the ups and downs of love – well, it ain’t easy. Hestia Harris gets it: “Life is a near-constant calculation of risks” she tells us, and she also believes we “are born knowing everything we need to know about love.” 

Through her deeply relatable and likable protagonist, Hestia, Christine Grillo has channeled the fear and rage and craziness of the past decade, giving readers a smart, hilarious, and ultimately compassionate view of what it is to live a meaningful life in a world full of strong opinions and even stronger weapons. 

Hestia Strikes a Match is the story of a woman in her early 40s, newly single thanks to the second Civil War (she is ostensibly widowed when her husband leaves to fight for the cause), and trying to figure out how to navigate dating, friendship, family, and career in a world defined by divisive politics and violence. Grillo manages to capture the uncertainty and fear of this era of political extremes, at the same time showing the difficulties of simply moving through middle age with more questions than answers, coming to terms with loneliness and compromise, and ultimately making peace with the myriad forces beyond our control.

I caught up with Chris and she answered some of my questions about this stunning debut.

Baltimore Fishbowl: Did you set out to write a novel that takes place during a civil war or did that come later? How did the plot of this novel evolve?

Christine Grillo: I think the first spark for this novel was a conversation with an old friend, someone whom I had really liked and would have characterized as simpatico. The conversation took place during the Trump Administration, and we were catching up after about 15 years. As we chatted, I realized that he had become shockingly right-wing. That exchange made me think a lot about what ideology can do to friendship and love, and I started writing about crappy romances taking place during a civil war.

BFB: What research, if any, did you do to write this book? How did the real-world events of Trump and January 6, etc. influence your writing/revision process?

CG: Life can be stranger than fiction, and real-world events proved satire-worthy. What feels weird to me now is that some of the events I “invented” for the novel later came true. For example, in the novel, terrorists bring down Baltimore’s electric grid, and in February of this year, neo-Nazis were arrested for plotting attacks on Baltimore’s electrical sub-stations. But back to your question: I had to do some reading about the original civil war to figure out the mechanics of what happened when, and I adjusted for today. I wrote timelines for the current unraveling, as well as a Declaration of Immediate Causes that Impel Secession, and even a preamble to the New Confederated States of America’s constitution. And does watching Derry Girls count as research?

BFB: Those Derry girls know civil war, so yes, that is 100% research! What was the most challenging part of writing this novel?

CG: I had a hard time figuring out why Hestia wants to find love. I got very granular with that question, trying to nail down what, exactly, people crave when they’re looking for a partner. Is it the hand-holding? Is it someone to text with? A best friend? What is it? But something else I struggled with then and now is the worry that I’ve made light of civil war. The novel is often humorous, but I don’t think there’s anything funny about our current ideological conflict. In a real-life civil war, people like Hestia, Mildred, Sarah, and Ed would probably be fine, because they have resources. But there are so many Americans—people whom we glimpse in the novel but are not represented fully—whose lives would be devastated by civil war. 

BFB: I’m glad you mention the humor in the novel, which reviewers – and even the jacket blurb – have noted. Did you set out to write a “slyly funny” novel? How did humor help you tell Hestia’s story?

CG: Civil war, white nationalism, and insurrection were all very much on my mind when I started writing this book. I wanted to write about those things, but I didn’t want to write a depressing book about how doomed we are. Who wants to read that? Characters like Hestia, Mildred, and Sarah allowed me to build a sad world, because their insecurities, squabbles, and confusions yield funny conversations and situations. Funny people are funny whether there’s a civil war not, which is a helpful fact.

BFB: Indeed! And one of the funniest characters is the inimitable Mildred, a sparky 80-something who provides much of the wisdom in the novel. Hestia’s job at a nursing home and the inclusion of excerpts from a writing club Hestia conducts with the residents of the home provide further perspectives from the octogenarian set. Was a nursing home always a part of Hestia’s story?

CG: Mildred is probably an amalgamation of several older ladies in my life who had no filter. I love when elderly people don’t hold back, because they have actual wisdom to share, unlike young people. The retirement village was a way for Hestia, who’s clueless in so many ways, to mingle with people who know some stuff and have seen some things. I remember talking with a dear friend’s elderly mother, I was remarking on how warm and generous she is, and she said, “Oh, well, I’m also petty and resentful and vindictive.” She said it with zero judgment toward herself. She just owned it. I love women like that and wanted to represent them.

BFB: Hestia’s other bestie is younger – a millennial – who provides an excellent foil for Mildred.

When I started writing the novel, Sarah mostly existed to illustrate how frustrating it is to be the Gen Xer who has to deal with the annoying tensions between millennials and Boomers in the workplace. But an agent wanted me to expand Sarah’s arc, and when I shared a draft with the Baltimore Fishbowl’s very own Betsy Boyd, she said, “Chris, you should make Sarah a foil.” So, of course, I did.

BFB: Already the book is receiving rave reviews and appearing on must-read lists. How does it feel?

It feels like I’ve won the lottery! I have no idea how this happened. But I’m also trying to detach a little bit from the reviews and lists now, because self-care means not checking Goodreads.  

BFB: Fair enough, but so far everything I’ve seen has been positive. The novel is so vivid, as I read I kept imagining the Netflix series. Have you thought about what actors would play the roles in a TV/movie version?

I certainly have! I have a long list. For Hestia, it’s a toss-up between Aubrey Plaza, Abbi Jacobson, and Lizzy Caplan. For Mildred, I’d love to see Judith Light or Lily Tomlin. There’s a UN Peacekeeper, Marcello, who I want to be played by Pedro Pascal. I can see Zach Galifianakis as the brother-in-law, Jamie, and I can see Alexei, the bartender, played by Jason Mantzoukis. I want Jack Black to be cast as Johnny Puppets, and I want Monkey Tea Tom to be played by Blake Anderson. I could go on, but I’ll finish by saying that Isabella Rossellini has to play the part of Clara, and if she could bring one of her goats from her farm to the set, I get first dibs on feeding it.  

Upcoming Events for Hestia Strikes a Match

Monday 4/17 Politics & Prose, Bethesda MD (in conversation with Angie Kim) 

https://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/christine-grillo-hestia-strikes-match-angie-kim-conn-ave

Thursday 4/20 The Ivy Bookshop, Baltimore MD (in conversation with Elizabeth Hazen)

https://www.theivybookshop.com/upcomingevent/33591

Saturday 4/22 Old Town Books, Alexandria VA (in conversation with Kristin Zory King)

Saturday 4/29 The Annapolis Book Festival (with Nikki Payne, Martha Anne Toll, Michelle Brafman)

https://www.keyschool.org/community/annapolis-book-festival/festival-panels

Tuesday 5/2 The Curious Iguana and Frederick Public Library, Frederick MD

Tuesday 5/31 The Center for Fiction, Brooklyn NY (with Elliot Ackerman)

BONUS! Here’s a 5-minute audiobook clip: https://soundcloud.com/macaudio-2/hestia-strikes-a-match-by-christine-grillo/s-KERQHr8prHg

Every year Washington Writers’ Publishing House, a literary co-op based in D.C., holds contests for residents of Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., selecting manuscripts in the categories of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry for publication. In 2022, The Jean Feldman Poetry Prize was awarded to Baltimore’s Anthony Moll for their debut collection, You Cannot Save Here. 

Growing out of the tradition of apocalyptic verse, Moll’s poems are rife with imagery that is at once familiar and unsettling. Their observations of alienation and collapse are juxtaposed with moments of intense intimacy, and the pervasive sense of doom is tempered by the beauty and power of the poems themselves. Though these poems show us the many ways in which our world verges on collapse, they also show the possibilities that may rise from the ashes.

Read on to find out more about this collection and Moll’s artistic process and vision.

Baltimore Fishbowl: What was the process of writing the book like? Often first collections are written over many years, but the poems here are so strongly connected in voice and theme, they seem to have been written in a more condensed timeframe.

Anthony Moll: Thanks! Because You Cannot Save Here is my second book, but my first collection of poems, I got some of the “everything needs to be in here” energy that comes with a debut out of my system with my first book, so here I was able to be more focused in my approach.

It helped too that this book was developed as part of my PhD dissertation. I’m about to defend a creative dissertation that includes a book-length manuscript of poems with a critical introduction. The introduction is a history and analysis of apocalyptic verse and associated movements. I’ve been working on it for about five years or so. That means I began this well before COVID. In fact, I thought I was nearly done at the outbreak of COVID, but the pandemic and associated quarantine were unavoidable topics, given the subject matter. You probably noticed that the last third of the book is the “pandemic section,” but what comes earlier are poems about all the other apocalypses we were experiencing before early 2020: climate disaster, economic inequity, war, the failure of democratic institutions, fascism reappearing after years in hiding.

BFB: Many of the poems reference the emptiness of consumer culture and the bleakness of a capitalist landscape – the spiritual wasteland of the strip mall and so on. Were you consciously trying to critique that aspect of our culture?

AM: I don’t think I come to poetry to consciously critique. Maybe sometimes, but I’m not sure that it’s the best tool for doing that. I’m mostly just trying to write intimate pieces about living during collapse. Since consumer culture & capitalism are responsible for that collapse, they’re just sort of unavoidable topics.

BFB: On a related note, did you grow up in suburbia? If so, how do you think that shaped your view of the world?

AM: No, I’ve been a city kid almost my entire life, but the city I grew up in was a small-sized city out west: Reno, Nevada. It’s an interesting place because, like a lot of cities out there, it grows outward rather than up. It’s a blend of urban, suburban and rural culture at times.

But Baltimore has become the place I’ve lived the longest, and most of this book is about what it means to be living here (“where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite”) during these times. (In fact, that strip mall I mention in the book is actually that strip mall at 20^th and Howard.)

You’re right though that I do make a lot of nods to the suburbs though, and it’s mostly talking shit about them.

BFB: Many of the poems have epigraphs that reference other works of literature.  Do you feel that your poems are in conversation with other works? How do your experiences as a reader inform your work as a writer?

AM: I think every writer is deeply influenced by the creative and intellectual work that surrounds & precedes them, and all literature is in conversation with other work.

Some writers do more to hide it, and others want to only show the highbrow influences, the art with which they hope people will see their work is in conversation. I want to be among the creators who refuse to do those things. I want to acknowledge that I’m deeply influenced by the folks I read (both poets and prose writers), and by the films I watch, by television and music and video games and theory and museums and by the axiology tucked into all of them. In part, I do so because I believe poetry should be a living art that is positioned alongside (not above) other forms of song and storytelling, and staying there requires refusing any pedestal.

BFB: The poems acknowledge human capacity for destruction and the sense of impending doom that seems to increasingly characterize day-to-day life. Where do you turn for hope?

AM: This sounds dramatic, but I am a bit skeptical of “hope,” at least in the common, narrative sense. I think (maybe too often) of that quote from Chekhov about how the bourgeoisie love happy endings because they suggest that we can keep going, just the way things are, and everything will be fine, that one can “be a beast and still be happy.” We’re past the climate change tipping point, and we’re barely slowing down. We’ve proven how poorly this nation responds to something like a global pandemic. Even under the less conservative of its two major parties, the U.S. continues to expand funding for military might at the cost of education, arts & humanities, and essential safety nets. Some sort of collapse has already arrived, and I’m not trying to hope it away.

But what I love, in both reading and writing, is work that finds joy and meaning despite collapse, that considers how romance & art & sex & ritual & cooking & feelings & being in the park with your chosen family is not only worthwhile and important, but essential during dark times. I don’t think that’s pessimistic so much as it is epicurean. Moreso, what I find most comforting during collapse is the possibility of after. Endings are scary, but they bring with them the possibility of something better. That’s a kind of hope too.

Which is to say, I’m also skeptical of “despair” and its functions.

Can you tell us a bit about the events you have coming up?

Yes! I’m building out a spring tour now that’s sort of the second half of the push for You Cannot Save Here. It will stretch out over a few months, but most immediately, I’ll be reading online @ Ok Zoomers on 23rd of January The monthly event is a partnership between two Pennsylvania literature organizations–The Mad Poets Society (Philadelphia) and Raven Rabbit Ram (Harrisburg)– and it’s really centered on bringing together poets from all over to connect and read their work. 

I’m also reading on Valentine’s Day for the Wilde Reading Series at the Columbia Arts Center alongside Melvin Brown, an iconic Baltimore poet and the longest-serving editor of (the recently recovered) literary journal Chicory. That’s a great, long-running series run by Laura Shovan, Ann Bracken and Linda Joy Burke out in Columbia, Maryland. I think I plan on getting into the spirit of the holiday and reading the selections from the book that are most about love, sex and desire!

Finally, I have a couple of cool events coming up with community partners, including a talk at the Walters Art Museum as part of their Queering the Collection series. It’s a newer series, and it’s so rad. They’re hosting queer artists and scholars to offer talks, readings and performances in the museum to illuminate the hidden and often erased ways that queer and trans lives (both artists and subjects) can be found in the museum’s collection. I’ll be joined by art historian Lisa Anderson-Zhu, and we’ll be discussing same-sex desire in the military culture of Ancient Greece and Rome. As we do, I’ll be reading from my first book (Out of Step: a Memoir) to demonstrate homoerotic and homosocial connections between ancient and contemporary military cultures. 

Events:

OK Zoomers Virtual Poetry Reading (Red Rabbit Ram & Mad Poets Society): Jan 23 @ 7 p.m. 

Queering the Collection: “Homosexuality in Ancient Greece & Rome” @ The Walters Art Museum: Feb 11 @ 2 p.m.

Wilde Reading Series (Columbia, MD), Columbia Arts Center: Feb 14 @ 7 p.m.

Books that explore the topic of addiction inundate the shelves of bookstores, a fact I see firsthand in the shop where I work, Bird in Hand. Among the titles are examinations of policy and the socio-economic causes and impacts of addiction, medical texts about the way the disease affects the mind and body, and of course biographies and memoirs chronicling that fall to rock-bottom and the clawing back up. So what makes Rafael Alvarez’s new book, “Don’t Count Me Out: A Baltimore Dope Fiend’s Miraculous Recovery” special?  

For one thing, this is a story in which the subject, Bruce White, simply should not have survived. The severity of his addiction and the lengths to which he was willing to go to feed it should have killed him many times over, as the book illustrates. Second, White not only came back from his addiction, but he completely transformed his life and dedicated himself to helping others. Finally, this book stands out because of the reporter’s distance Alvarez uses to tell White’s story. At no point does he sensationalize (the material is sensational enough without any editorial embellishment) or sentimentalize; he simply reports the story of one man’s journey from the picket fences of suburbia to flophouses, to prison, and back again to run successful recovery centers all over our city.

Both author Rafael Alvarez and Bruce White himself spoke to me about the process of writing the book. 

Baltimore Fishbowl to Rafael Alvarez: In the introduction to the book, you describe a 2012 phone call from Bruce White in which he asks you to write his story. Did you decide to take on the project right away, or did you need convincing? What, if any, doubts/hesitations did you have about the endeavor?? What were your reasons for moving forward with the project? 

Rafael Alvarez: After a half-dozen or so years staffing various network TV shows, I was in Hollywood chasing work after the WGA writers’ strike and the Great Recession and staff jobs and selling pilot ideas were hard to come by, at least for me. I missed Baltimore and writing about Baltimore. I’d go to Dodger games and spend nine innings wishing I was at Camden Yards.

When Bruce called, he dropped the name of someone I knew and trusted from Little Italy, so he got my attention right away. I had no idea the story would be as fantastic (in the true sense of the word) as it turned out to be. I had no doubts about the project – or pretty much any project that might have come my way at the time because I needed work. I made no promises of publication (the Cornell angle presented itself after I’d been reporting the story for five years), only that I would produce a professional telling of his story.

Baltimore Fishbowl to Bruce White: Why Rafael Alvarez? What led you to call him and ask him to write your story?

Bruce White: A friend of mine introduced us. Rafael seemed to be an accomplished writer. It just felt like the right thing when I met him.

BFB: Could you describe the process of writing the book? How long did it take? What were the primary challenges? What was most rewarding about the experience?

RA: From the time of Bruce’s phone call in August 2012 it took a little more than ten years to span my first interview with him (at the original Zeke’s on Harford Road) to a published book in the fall of 2022. My process was to transcribe my notes with Bruce (including many pages that he dictated into his computer), make notes in the margins, and then go over those notes in our next meeting while pushing the chronology forward. 

In between meetings with Bruce, which for years were at least two to three times a month, I’d chase documents and people he mentioned in the story: his various arrest and charging documents as well as kids he grew up with, classmates and, after about a month of digging, the 7th grade assistant principal that had him expelled from Towsontowne Junior High. It was old fashioned, shoe leather newspaper work ultimately welded together as a book. The “writing” was the icing on the cake.

BW: Well, the first chapter I wrote in my one-bedroom apartment, and it sat for a couple years. Then I went to college, got a degree, and started my business, so I could afford vacations. I went to Costa Rica, and I would sit out on my deck every morning and write for a couple hours. At sunset I would sit and drink coffee and write for a couple more, and I did that for seven or eight years. There are probably 30 chapters of different stuff I gave Rafi, and he composed the book out of that. My book would have been too violent. My writing was not book-worthy. I’m not a writer, so I wrote my experiences down and let Rafael transform that into the book. 

BFB: Based on the length of time Bruce spent as an addict, I’m guessing there were quite a few stories about the highs (literal and figurative) and lows that you didn’t have space to include. How did you decide what went in the book? Are there any stories that didn’t make the cut, but that you wish you could have included?

RA: The challenge was the balance between his former life as a reckless, violent boy and man and the past 20 years of a “new” man, one who has devoted his life to helping fellow addicts and, if possible, balance the ledger of his deeds and misdeeds. The opening chapter – SWAT team shoot up and his near-death experience leading to doing heavy time – set the tone for the rest of the book. The recovery pages may be less than the bad-ass pages, but I felt the ‘weight’ of the new life made up for it.

BW: There’s a hundred stories that aren’t in it. Rafi’s got at least two other books of stories. 

BFB:  The problem of addiction is one that people struggle with all over the world, but your title specifies that this is the story of a Baltimore addict. What about Bruce’s story is uniquely Baltimorean?

RA:  What fascinates me is there is nothing unique about drug addiction. Bruce came from Leave it to Beaver, white picket fence 1960s virtually monolithically white, upper middle class Lutherville – he had dance lessons in the first grade! – and still wound up in prison. The Baltimore through-line? Dope don’t give a shit.

BFB:  What do you hope readers will take away from the story? 

RA: Very simply, the line he emphasizes in the book: “If I can get clean and sober, anybody can.”

BW: If I want to be 100% honest with myself, the story needed to be told to the addict who still suffers and is counted out by everybody—including himself. I’m a big prayer and meditator. The universe directed me here. The story needed to be told. Not because of me, but because of the message. It’s a message far beyond me. This just happens to be my experience. I believe it was meant to be told.

Book Launch: Sunday, Oct. 30, 6 p.m. at Ikaros Restaurant, 4901 Eastern Avenue. Alvarez and White will both be speaking. Free event. 

Baltimore-based poet Elizabeth Hazen reflects on the “complicated gift” of nostalgia.

When I am overwhelmed with adult life, I think of childhood days home from school with a cold, cozy in bed. My mother moves the living room TV into my room, and I spend hours watching syndicated episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched and reading Sweet Valley High. My mother brings me snacks, presses her palm to my forehead, and leaves my door open a crack so I can call her if I need anything. With my father at work and my brother at school, I bask in the rare light of her focus. My memory stops before the boredom of the afternoon, when the TV switches to talk shows and soap operas and my brother barges back home with my schoolwork, leaving me to face the prospect of tomorrow.

The power to edit separates memory from lived experience, but it does not mute the pangs of intense longing. Saturday mornings, sprawled on the shag carpet with my brother, watching He-Man and The Smurfs and Jem, shoveling cereal into my mouth. My dogged labors throughout secondary school, fueled by my belief that hard work alone ensures success. My first love and our first kiss in the chill air outside a movie theater that no longer exists. The lavender scent of my infant son’s neck as I rock him in the semi-dark. 

I can’t repeat the past, but I can remember and bask in reimagining, which is mercifully free from the sharp edges and shadows I would surely encounter if I could, in fact, go back. I can scroll through photos on my phone and be transported to last summer, cruising west on old Route 66 with my son, a teenager now, just the two of us, music blaring, red rock formations, and brilliant desert sky surrounding us. I can listen to a Bowie song, and my brother is instantly beside me. I can catch the scent of irises, and I am in my childhood backyard, swaying on a tire swing and singing “Walk Like an Egyptian” to myself.

Our capacity to remember past happiness, to experience nostalgia, is a complicated gift. The term comes from two Greek words: nostos and algos—a longing to return home and the pain that goes along with this longing. And therein lies the rub: with any remembered pleasure comes a terrible sense of loss: we can’t repeat the past, no matter how vivid it returns to us in our minds; we are homesick for places that no longer exist, for people who are not coming back, for selves we cannot be again. 

After dinner, my fifteen-year-old son wants to see pictures of his cat, Ferdinand, as a kitten. How old is he now? Our calculations lead us to conclude that he is well into middle age—at least nine or ten. My son can hardly believe it! How terribly fast time passes, and without warning. And what delight I see in his face—no longer a child but still so heartbreakingly young—as he scrolls through images of Ferdinand, though the true delight seems to come from the images of himself—that person he once was—the terrible haircuts, the mismatched and ill-fitting outfits, the evocative combination of familiarity and distance. I view the pictures of myself as a young mother with the same hesitant affection. Who is that woman—or really, who is that girl? What is she thinking? Does she already know that her marriage is ending? Is she worrying about money or the baby weight she still carries? Has she had her first drink of the day? Some things are better left behind, but I wish I could go back to remind that girl how soon her child will grow out of her arms, and to caution her against the impulse toward oblivion.

My son waxes nostalgic about the days before he felt stress over school and friends and the fleeting nature of time. He looks at class pictures in which he is maskless and smiling. I will never be happy like that again, he tells me. 

Initially, nostalgia was considered a disorder, a form of melancholy, and indeed, dwelling too long in the past can make any of us feel depressed. The term was coined in the seventeenth century by Dr. Johannes Hoffer, a Swiss military doctor who diagnosed mercenaries fighting battles far from home. 

My son’s nostalgia kick lasts for days. He asks if we can watch The Pink Panther, Scooby-Doo. We were just the two of us when we first watched these episodes, before I married my now-husband and we moved in with him and his children. We sat in the downstairs of the house that was perfect for just-us, the house that was mine, snuggled under comforters, he with the cat curled on his lap, letting me hold them both. I sit with him, my heart hurting from so much past coming back to me. 

My son marvels at the cruelty of time, tells me how much he hates the way it moves so fast, the way some days are pure drudgery and all excitement and joy seem relegated to the past. What can I say to him but that there will surely be more excitement and more joy, that we all feel hopeless sometimes, that feelings—good and bad—will pass? I bite my tongue before noting that those new thrills will also pass too soon, that they will be interspersed with losses and disappointments, that human nature dictates we can’t help but revise as we look back.

Today, psychologists argue that nostalgia lifts our moods, gives us a sense of connection to the past and meaning in the present, helps us break free from brooding over loss. So long as we don’t lose ourselves in reminiscing about the past, or fixate on the loss of the past itself, memories of happy times serve us well—and after the stress and doubt of these past few years, it seems we are all more than ready to reflect on “simpler times.” Even if we can’t repeat the past, we surely can visit it in our imaginations.

I tell my son I miss those early days, too, though I say nothing about the demons I have tried to leave behind. I no longer drink, my marriage is solid, and I am beginning to acknowledge my limitations and even, some days, my strengths. I say nothing about what happens as we age, the thrill of firsts diminishing: no more first kisses, first homes, first loves, firstborns. I say nothing about the acceleration of time the older you get, the way years pass now as months once did, the way I grew older before I had time to grow up. 

I tell him time is a river. We must let the current carry us, taking in what we can. To fight the current invites injury. Do what the experts say: lie on your back, protect your head, go with the flow, breathe.

Even as I write this, my phone dings with a New York Times article about nostalgia and our current inclination for bygone things. Last week, I heard a radio story about the resurgence of pop-punk music, manifesting in the When We Were Young festival. This year’s Super Bowl ads also played to our hunger for the past: Jim Carrey as The Cable Guy, Mike Myers as Austin Powers, Steve Buscemi in a bowling alley as in The Big Lebowski. And the halftime show itself was a fabulously joyful return to the late 90s, the now middle-aged artists bringing their A games to play hit songs from decades ago. And what about all the TV reboots? Just Like That (Sex and the City), Bel-Air (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), Twin Peaks: The Return (Twin Peaks), and more—not to mention numerous original series from the 90s and 00s that have been streaming in vast numbers. The future brims with uncertainty and violence and harsh colors; it is no surprise that we prefer looking back. 

Nostalgia is one way we cope with our powerlessness over time. That rushing river, that unidirectional force, that measure of everything we do and every version of self. Time is indifferent to us, but we are entirely in service to it. So what do I tell my son? You can’t fight time. You can’t alter its pace or make a case for why you need more of it. You can’t know how much you have. You can only move with it, learn from it, try to make peace with it. 

In my inbox, I find the weekly message from Shutterfly: “Your memories from X number of years ago this week.” One click and there is my son, toothless and grinning, face smeared with sweet potato puree. There is a house I no longer inhabit, friends I no longer know, a self I no longer know, a life to which I can never return. The link, “Relive this memory,” a tempting lie. 

If I really think about it, though, I must acknowledge the angst and uncertainty of my twenties and thirties, the self-destructive patterns I did not yet recognize, the insecurities that stifled my voice. My nostalgia fades ultimately into more honest reflection on the past, and I fix on what might be a lesson in all this looking back: one day, I will long for the moment I am in right now. I remind myself to pay attention, to savor what I can.

Sometimes I think that, through memory, we build armor, adding layer upon layer like expanding Russian dolls. I see my son’s face hardening, his defenses stronger, and his actions more careful and strategic than they were even a month ago. Sometimes I think the opposite; memory strips us away, like birch bark in a storm, or onion skin, revealing more vulnerable interiors. His face as the Pink Panther dumps laundry soap into the machine, the way his voice changes when he exclaims over pictures of the cat. Likely, it is both, some memories serving to strengthen us and others allowing us to let down our guards and become, if only for a moment, who we once were. 

There is a certain slant of light this time of year, not quite spring but beginning to thaw, when the bare trees almost shimmer, as if the tight beginnings of buds were filled with gold. I remember mothering my young son less in image than in sensation, like the half-recollection of a pleasant dream—the ache in my breasts, the giddy fatigue, the scent of his scalp, the heft of him. I can’t repeat the past. He can’t either. None of us can. I check my inbox. I drink tea and practice breathing. I watch the world through the window, the light always shifting, but this slant of light I carry with me, and inside it that impossible hope, that green light across the bay, that beautiful, remembered lie that the past is ours to edit, that time is something we can hold, that to repeat our rosy versions of the past, we need only close our eyes. 

Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Epoch, Best American Poetry, American Literary Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and other journals. She has published two collections of poetry with Alan Squire Publishing, Chaos Theories (2016) and Girls Like Us (2020). She lives in Baltimore with her family. This essay was originally published in Coachella Review.

Princesses have long captured the imagination of the public and shaped feminine ideals. A child of the 80s, I grew up with the first-wave of Disney princesses on VHS, Princess Diana all over the magazines in the supermarket checkout line, and aisles in Toys ‘R Us throbbing with pink packages containing an array of princess dolls, costumes, jewelry, and games. I read fairy tales and the message was, paradoxically, that female power lies in passivity and submission. While the portrayals of these women have evolved over the decades since my childhood, misogyny and unbalanced power dynamics continue to play a significant role in our culture’s attitudes toward women. 

In her new novel, “The Force of Such Beauty,” Barbara Bourland delves into these issues through the story of Princess Caroline, a former Olympic runner who marries the prince of a small European kingdom and learns the hard way how quickly fairy tales can become horror stories. Confined to a castle, reduced to being merely a reproductive vessel, and stripped of all autonomy, Caro must decide whether to accept her situation or fight for her freedom. Bourland’s third book is engaging and powerful, telling an exciting and wrenching tale that is both timeless and of-the-moment. 

I was able to get some background on this fabulous new novel from the author herself.

Baltimore Fishbowl: Caroline, the protagonist of “The Force of Such Beauty,” is an Olympic-level distance runner before she meets Finn. Why did you decide to make that Caroline’s talent? Did you do a lot of research about distance running? Are you a runner yourself?

Barbara Bourland: I am a runner and a notably terrible one—I have a hard time pacing, my gait sucks, I get overheated easily. Yet there’s so much that I love about this dumb, simple sport. The high is key—it is such a good high—as is the absolute joy of running in a race surrounded by all kinds of bodies. In general, you can have any kind of body to be a runner. Timed competition, however, rewards youth and cisgendered male bodies. To run in a timed race of any real distance is to guarantee that you will basically always watch the cismen outrun everyone else; you will always feel like other kinds of bodies are destined to come in second. I wanted that specific hierarchy, and this sort of theatrical pursuit of equality and fairness that competition engenders, to be part of Caroline’s sense of self. I wanted her to come from something that not only would leave an aching hole where her dopamine used to be, but for her preconceptions and biases to make her vulnerable to falling in love with an autocrat—for the fairytale pitch of “I’m going to take care of you, because I know best” to seem fatefully accurate.

Caroline wants to be free to move her body as she pleases, but once she forces it to perform qualitatively, to value it only for its speed, it breaks. When she gives it over to her husband in exchange for security, it is bound up—utterly limited—by his decisions. It is only once she decides to be separate from the rules governing her body that she finds any sense of freedom.

BFB: The fact that Caro is largely uneducated is a characteristic that seems to make her even more suited to the role of princess. Why was this an important feature of her character? Was this true of the real-life princesses you researched?

BB: Caroline’s lack of a formal education or professional training outside of her sport puts her in the position that many women are in all over the world: her next best option is to be a wife and mother, wholly dependent on a primary earner. Supporting ourselves without explicitly using our bodies as the medium of labor—either as objects of regard or as reproductive assets—unequivocally requires education, professional development, and control over our reproductive futures. It requires that we stop seeing ourselves, or our daughters, as vessels.

The real-life princesses who I researched were generally being trained for their role from birth in some way or another. Their defined economic reach was toward marriage, full stop, and as such, their educations reflected that role—play a little, draw a little, make good conversation, etc. Their graduation from that education into a “professional life” came at the time of their earliest years of fertility; Diana Spencer, for example, was educated at an actual finishing school in Switzerland, engaged at nineteen, and married at twenty. 

BFB: Before Caro meets Finn, the prince, she has an accident that ends her running career and leads to surgeries that make her even more conventionally beautiful than she had been in the past. Her body also changes because of her new lifestyle, which has the sole purpose of getting Caroline to carry babies to term, and she trains for this eventuality with the same intensity she used to train for marathons. In both cases, her body holds tremendous power, but that power is tenuous and fleeting — and not fully her own. What is the book saying about power? 

BB: Power comes from choice: the choice to act or not, to connect or disconnect, to accept or reject, to love or to leave. There is no real choice available for women within structures that are explicitly designed to oppress and exploit us as reproductive vessels; at “best” we can trade a life as the exploited for the life of one who exploits.

The princess story—the journey toward the castle that will keep you safe and a search for the prince whose commitment will validate you—is the grand, sparkling archetype of voluntary submission to power. It is not a story of empowerment or hope. It is, now and always, a story of self-oppression and self-delusion. My own goal in writing this book was to dig the princess story out of my bones and hold it up to the light where it shines like rotted meat instead of a diamond. To change how I see it, and hopefully how the reader sees it, as well, and to ideally accomplish that with empathy and care.

BFB:  A major topic in the book concerns the subjugation of women’s bodies — something that is of particular relevance and concern today. Any thoughts/comments about the current (nightmarish) reality facing women in this country?

BB: Women have the full and absolute right to control our own bodies. We have the right to adorn them or not, to enhance them or not, to change them or not in the ways that please and complete us. We have the right to cut and color our hair, to trim our nails, to get top surgery or breast enlargements, to use tampons or free bleed through our shorts; to take hormones; to carry a fetus to term and have a baby if we so choose, and if not, to have an abortion at any time. We have these rights. Our bodies belong to us, and to no one else. Whether or not these rights are enshrined in law is the problem facing us at this moment, and as we have seen, laws can be changed. We must fight for legal protections for the rights we inherently possess; we must do so not only for ourselves but for the people of the future. 

We have these rights. If we give them away, like Caroline chooses to in “The Force of Such Beauty,” we are destined to suffer the same consequences.

Events:

Thursday, September 8, 2022
Hidden Palace Reading Series
Fadensonnen, 7pm

Wednesday, September 28, 2022
“The Force of Such Beauty”: Launch & GR Book Club 
Greedy Reads Remington, 8pm

Friday, November 18, 2022
Rum & Redaction Reading Series 
Old Line Spirits, 6:30pm

Elise Levine’s new book, Say This, is composed of two linked novellas that take on the aftermath – both immediate and over decades – of a violent, meth-fueled murder. But this is far from your typical crime novel. Critics have characterized Levine’s previous books — two collection of stories and two novels — as lyrical, experimental, and genre-bending. Those qualities are all the more evident in the context of the current subject matter.

In the first of the two novellas, Eva Hurries Home, the title character, now in her early 40s, reflects on her sexual relationship with her older cousin, the man who goes on to commit the crime central to this book, when she was just a young teen. That cousin is now in prison for life, and a celebrity reporter is hoping to speak with Eva about the murder. The second section, Son One, moves between the points of view of the victim’s siblings, his father, and his stepmother. In this novella, Levine seemingly effortlessly applies the abecedarian form – a form which progresses alphabetically so the first section contains sentences beginning with the letter A, the second with the letter B, and so on. Levine’s handling of the form is so deft, readers may not even realize Levine is working with such a strict formal constraint until reading the notes at the end of the book.

Levine addresses questions of identity and the impact of violence as well as addiction, consent, and society’s exploitation of trauma, and does so in gorgeous, surprising, and utterly gripping prose.

Originally from Toronto, Levine teaches in the MA in Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. She was kind enough to share with us some insights about her process and the inspiration behind her latest book.

Baltimore Fishbowl: How did you come up with the idea for Say This? 

Elise Levine: In Spring 2017 I was living in Baltimore—as I still do—and working in Washington (which I no longer do). I was unhappy in my job, and began to think of a character making the same commute, also unhappy, with work, her weariness, a cold spring, rain for days. I wrote a quick draft of what is now Chapter 2 of Eva Hurries Home, the first novella in Say This, and realized that the character Eva needed more room to develop than what a short story could afford but not as much as with a novel. And that I could make use of my sense of gaps surrounding her, of what I didn’t know: at heart her story would be one of silence, the elliptical, what she didn’t know about herself.

Then I wrote what would become the first chapter, which captures the sexual entanglement between Eva and her older cousin when she’s in her early teens, in northern Oregon and southern Washington State, where I had spent an extended period of time a year earlier. And I had the form: fragments surrounded by lots of white space, to model adult Eva’s forensic turning of her splintered memories around in her head and the abrupt, charged choices she now makes. The rest—in which Eva’s cousin has gone on to murder a man, and a celebrity journalist contacts Eva in hopes she’ll reveal the details of what transpired long ago between she and her cousin, for part of a true crime book the journalist is writing—began to fall into place.

BFB: Did you initially set out to write linked novellas? 

EL: For years I’d thought that what became the second novella, Son One, which explores a family’s grief in the aftermath of violent crime, would be a short story. But I never knew how to really start, or where it might lead. I was halfway through a complete draft of Eva Hurries Home when it occurred to me that the man Eva’s cousin murders could be the son and brother of the bereaved family. It was as if this narrative had been waiting in the back of my brain for Eva’s to come along before I could reach out and bring the voices of these characters into view.

BFB: One aspect of Say This that stands out – and a characteristic of your work that critics have noted in previous works – is the impressive development of characters. Do you have a particular method for developing characters?

EL: I call it the head-banging method. I keep asking questions about the characters, locating the walls they put around themselves, trying over and over to break through them. I look for their contradictions, what they find unsayable and unknowable about themselves—and how these drive their choices. Usually this is a long process, involving rafts of notes and revisions that include searching for the right register, and part of the challenge for me in writing these two novellas lay in distinguishing between their tone and voices. The strategic use of point of view really helped with this. Eva Hurries Home uses a very close third-person point of view, which fosters intimacy between the reader and character and yet offers a degree of detachment—which suited Eva’s coolly rational yet emotional grapplings with her past and present. Son One uses four first-person narrators whose deeply intimate voices cycle throughout. A strange and welcome experience: nearly the very second I (finally!) finished a complete draft of Eva Hurries Home, much of the sections for each of the characters in Son One came to me fast and furious. The revision process for these involved mostly just tinkering to adjust the voices and various timelines and character arcs.

BF: On a related note, the character who links these novellas, the murderer himself, is seen and heard only in brief scenes and flashbacks mediated through the other characters. 

EL: I centered the characters affected by sexual exploitation and the aftermath of violent crime—Eva and the family of the murdered man—rather than the perpetrator’s experiences of what he did and how. I hope I created the grounds in Say This for the reader to at least entertain the possibility of empathy for him. But this ultimately isn’t his story nor is the focus on the acts he’s committed.

BFB: In other interviews, you and your interlocutors have noted the ways in which form and content play off of each other in your work. Has form always been a central consideration in your writing? 

EL: I’ve always understood form and style as elements in service of character. But with Say This I felt greater freedom to formally experiment. Here I was writing a novella— when I’d previously written short stories and novels—and then a second one, so why not take things further? Especially in light of the characters’ experiences with the unsayable, the unanswerable, which called out for me to push hard on the use of fragments and white space as a kind counter-text. And also, for Son One, the abecedarian, in which the first section begins with the letter A, the next section with B, and so on to Z, and then back again to A. This form helped me get at the characters’ desperation to impose meaning on what was an essentially meaningless act, a way of trying to contain the immensity of their overpowering grief.

BFB: I have read that you don’t write poetry, but do you read poetry? Do you have favorite poets? Any strong poetic influences? Or influences you’d like to mention in general?

EL: Fiction with its long-haul demands seems to suck me in and give me a good shake and not let me go. I do try to read as much poetry as I can though, for the high-wire attention to language and the compressed interrogations of the self and the forces that pressure it. Poets whose work I’ve recently loved: Diane Seuss, Donika Kelly, Don Mee Choi. Dora Malech, Maureen Hynes. Also, I loved the collection Girls Like Us, by a certain Baltimore-based poet by the name of Elizabeth Hazen.

Virtual Launch for Say This
Elise Levine in Conversation With Jung Yun, March 9 at 7pm sponsored by The Ivy Bookshop, event page here.

Thirty years ago, when I began to write in earnest, a teacher encouraged me to start submitting my work to literary journals. Just a teenager, I was unfamiliar with the form, but over the years journals have become for me, as for most literary writers, the way into the world of publishing.

For readers, these publications are like a tasting menu – dozens of poems by a variety of poets, several short stories or essays, even excerpts from novels-in-progress – all by writers from different backgrounds, different levels of experience and often with wide-ranging attitudes and voices. It’s like the mixtape of the written word, introducing audiences to a group of writers of whom they might otherwise never be aware.

There are hundreds of active literary journals in the U.S. today. Some, but by no means all, are affiliated with universities and MFA programs, but there are many that are independent entities or offshoots of small presses. For every big-name journal like Gettysburg Review or Kenyon Review, Ploughshares or Poetry magazine, there are dozens of smaller, lesser-known publications with dedicated staffs who sift through submissions out of love of the written word and respect for the writing community.

Baltimore is home to several well-respected journals — The Baltimore Review, Little Patuxent Review, Loch Raven Review, and Smartish Pace, to name a few. The Jarnal is Baltimore’s latest, the project of Mason Jar Press, a Baltimore publisher established in 2014 that publishes both handmade, limited-run chapbooks and full-length books. In 2021, managing editor Michael B. Tager and the rest of the staff at Mason Jar embarked on the process of bringing us this exciting new magazine. We spoke to Michael about this endeavor.

Baltimore Fishbowl: Why a literary magazine? What were your goals when you decided to start The Jarnal? 

Michael Tager: Everyone here at Mason Jar got their start, in one way or another, with literary journals: submitting to them, creating them, reading for them. We’re firm believers that lit journals are the heartsblood of the whole writing “thing.” They’re just really cool literary artifacts, curated from a particular editor(s)’ aesthetic and formed from whatever came in on the call. Then out into the world, to wreak what havoc they may.

We’ve tinkered with doing a journal here for years but were never able to get it together for one reason or another. Online journals are a nonstop endeavor with rolling submission periods, long back-and-forths with staff members, etc. We knew we couldn’t do it.

Back in April we decided to go for it, but in a sustainable way, like other journals and magazines like Hobart After Dark (HAD) do: brief submission periods, brief reading periods, and then shutting it down. We leaned into this spirit of a pop-up in every way: four-day submission window, low word count (3 poems or 1000 words per sub) and a time limit on acceptances–1 week from close of submissions. Even our editing and publication window were tight; it came out in October, so a 6-month turnaround from start to finish.

This was all to keep it in that spirit. To not overthink things, to go with the gut and still put out something cool and weird and literary. Which we did! And we have another one that’s going to open for submissions at our website on March 1, with a guest editor (Aditya Desai) to keep the whole thing fresh.

BFB:  What is unique about The Jarnal? What do you hope readers will take away from your publication? 

MT: Mason Jar has its own aesthetic: we like it weird, but we also like it accessible, and our catalog reflects that. The kinds of writers who follow and submit to us are drawn to what we do and reflect that same kind of taste. It isn’t avant-garde, but it isn’t exactly the run-of-the-mill, either and we think it’s a pretty good time. We hope a reader will sit down and snicker at its idiosyncrasies, and then be leveled by the occasional gut punch, which is sort of how we like to roll in general. We’re all serious people who don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we tend to put that out into the world.

BFB:  What was your editorial process? Did any aspect of the process surprise you? High points? Low points?

MT: I went into this with the mindset of not overthinking anything. As may be suspected, a lot of writers are big overthinkers and that can bog down any creative process. It’s not a bad thing, but I wanted to avoid it, so I made a lot of snap decisions and I’m surprised that it worked well. I mean, I accepted one piece about 6 minutes after it was submitted because it hit me just right. The author was quite surprised by that turnaround.

I don’t know if I was surprised by anything beyond the number of subs (450 submitted in that 4-day period). Since it was our first time doing it, and we didn’t advertise beforehand or anywhere besides our social media, I didn’t expect that kind of response. Of the 23 authors whose work made it into the book, 18 of them were total strangers to me. We were also the first publication for at least one of those authors, which is an amazing feeling.

BFB: There is a huge range of voices and styles in this volume. Did you set out with diversity as a goal?

MT: Diversity is something we’re committed to and something we’ve been working toward from the beginning. There’s always a lot more work to be done, but we hope that the kinds of submissions we get are the results of years of doing our best to be responsible citizens. So, no, the goal of the journal wasn’t to be diverse so much as the goal of our press is to be as inclusive as possible.

BFB: If you could give any advice to submitters, what would it be?

MT: Read the guidelines and follow them. I couldn’t tell you how many submissions for this call that I rejected out of hand for not doing that. I’m not a stickler (I’m not going to reject something that’s 1001 words when I asked for 1000), but for something like this, I was more of one than usual. I don’t think writers realize just how many submissions presses and journals receive and what kind of limited staff they have. For me, I had 450 subs to get through, by myself, on a very tight deadline, and that meant that if someone really drew outside the lines, they were pretty much automatically rejected, with a form letter that said they failed to follow the guidelines.

Showing up prepared is more than half the battle as far as I’m concerned, because so many people don’t.

BFB: Any other plans — either concrete or just hopes/dreams for the future — for The Jarnal/other projects through Mason Jar? 

MT: We have every intention of doing an issue of The Jarnal every year with a new guest editor! Every year it will have a different tone and sensibility, in order to get different viewpoints out in the world. We’re super excited about it.

Dean Bartoli Smith’s second poetry collection, Baltimore Sons, paints a brutally honest portrait of Charm City – a place bursting with personality and charm, but also marred by poverty and violence. In these poems, readers will find neighborhoods filled with vibrant people who, along with the city itself, have shaped the speaker’s perspective.

Smith’s poems range from snapshots of childhood pastimes and homages to iconic Baltimoreans to missives about gun violence and even poems from the weapons’ perspectives. Despite the grit and realism in his work, Smith never despairs, instead highlighting the humanity that ultimately redeems the city and its residents. According to Smith, “No one really knows what to make of native Baltimoreans. The city remains a wildcard that’s hard to define,” but through these poems, Smith has certainly given us a powerful representation.

A Baltimore native with a background in reporting and a journalistic eye for detail, Smith has written a collection that is accessible, heartbreaking, and “the most painful love letter I’ve ever written.”

Recently he spoke with Baltimore Fishbowl about his new collection.

Baltimore Fishbowl: What was the process of writing the poems in this book? 

Dean Smith: I wrote the poems in Baltimore Sons over a 20-year period beginning in 2000. I didn’t know where the book would take me. It first started as “My Father’s Gun” and then it evolved into more of a poetic memoir with vignettes about Baltimore as a microcosm of our nation.

After my father bought a gun in the early 2000s, I grew concerned for him and the Baltimore we both love. I developed a persona in the gun poems that’s loosely based on him but also a composite of a mindset that I’ve encountered throughout my life. Then I started writing poems about firearms as the focus of our country’s obsession: their complicity in the destruction of a city and by extension our nation, their place in the subconscious of the male psyche, and their metaphorical significance in my own life as the offspring of a shotgun wedding.

BFB: Could you talk a bit about what guns meant to you as a child and what they mean to you now? 

DS: There are too many guns in the collection and in our country. We’ve become desensitized to them. We have 17-year-olds walking around with automatic weapons policing protests, and it starts at a young age. The book is a blunt instrument on that score on purpose. I started reflecting on guns after Virginia Tech, the DC Sniper and Sandy Hook. I want the reader to say, “this is too much,” because it is. It’s an intervention and a wakeup call.

Baltimore Sons explores the root cause of how we got to this place of active shooters on the loose every week. As boys, we were mesmerized by the echo of a Winchester rifle reverberating through the canyon during a Western. We played “guns” in the woods. We made the sounds of machine guns as we shot each other. The gun as one of the main characters in this collection serves as an objective correlative on steroids. Anger, hatred, self-loathing, and love in the form of worship are all prevalent emotions. The poems from the perspective of guns were fun to write because I had no idea what would happen.

The book’s central arc takes the reader through a childhood where violence leads to positive outcomes and then into adulthood as the narrator bears witness to the destruction those weapons have caused.

BFB: What inspired you to write about Booker T. Spicely, a young Black man who was murdered in North Carolina in the 1940s?

I wrote about Booker Spicely in the aftermath of Ahmaud Arbery. Guns, race, Jim Crow and the “I felt threatened” excuse were still intact. I also needed to look at my Baltimore past related to race. The poem, “Reading James Baldwin on Election Day in Charleston” started those excavations. Who were the people of color in my life?

BFB: As the title suggests, this book is indebted to Baltimore for so much of its content. What do you think makes Baltimore unique? What do you hope readers unfamiliar with Baltimore will take away about this great city? 

DS: It’s a hard place, a real place, a holy place. There is a moxie, a survivalist mentality. Baltimore is not full of itself. The city embodies humility. There is a grit to it. It’s always been about the work–about making ends meet. Baltimoreans forged the steel that built the heartland at Sparrows Point. Its soldiers defended Ft. McHenry. It’s close and tight knit. You are always just around the corner from someone who knows you from grade school. Baltimore is memory, nostalgia, and blood–marble steps scrubbed clean, a peppermint stick in a lemon wedge at the city fair, mustard from a backfin on your finger, Matthew’s Pizza. Baltimore is America.

 BFB: Lots of “characters” appear throughout the collection. Are there any people who didn’t make the cut? 

DS: Many! My grandmother, Carolyn Bartoli ran a beauty salon in her basement off Harford Road. I’d sweep up and listen to the conversations that took place between the beehive dryers. Junk dealers, bookies and all types stopped in. My father, Snuffy Smith, coached college basketball during the city’s Division II heyday when Loyola, Towson, Baltimore University, Hopkins and Morgan squared off in the ’70s. The battles were heated. Players like Isaiah “Bunny” Wilson, George Pinchback, Ronald Smith, Brian “Gumby” Matthews and Morgan’s Marvin “The Human Eraser” Webster who starred in the NBA deserve their own collection of poems. Also absent: Nina Simone and Norm Van Lier. Their poems were not quite there.    

BFB: Many of the poems describe moments from your childhood, and you capture the atmosphere of the time and place so vividly. Do you have thoughts about the way kids today spend their time?

DS: Kids today have a different perspective. Everything is immediate in the next Snapchat, text, or TikTok videos. They’ve rightly retreated into the electronic bunker in response to September 11th, school shootings, global warming and now the pandemic–the effects of which are still to come. They don’t trust us. My kids call me “Boomer.” I bristle at that. When I was a kid, we pitched baseball cards. They were our cell phones. They contained biographies and data. Record album liner notes, too. You couldn’t customize a playlist from “Exile on Main Street” or “Are You Experienced?” In addition to instant access to far more knowledge than we ever had, today’s youth have a sense of what a better, non-racist, empathetic, and accepting world looks like.

BFB: What projects are you currently working on?

DS: I’ve been working on a series of poems inspired by the magical realism of my 17-year-old daughter’s art.